Best explanation of what is going on with the state of the game after IEM

General Discussion
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I generally agree with beastyqt on many things. I disagree with him on a few things. However I think his view on the state of the game currently is very accurate. Well worth the watch.

In short zerg have a essentially a different economy design and by default have a reactive macro playstyle which cannot be challenged in the late game. Protoss and terran have build orders that once you know they are coming you can prep for. The longer a tournament goes on the better zerg can prep (it’s why classic was 3-0 by dark last year or why zest got 4-1ed or whatever by rogue this year after both played incredible series against zerg the series before. Rogue isn’t better than serral. Why did he win so easily? The answer is obvious); the reverse is not true for zerg who basically just macro to 80 drones behind queens and then build whatever they want. What needs to be fixed is a design where protoss and terran can punish zerg for greed because currently they can’t due to having just a handful of strats that are even possibly viable and if you don’t kill them in the mid game, you can’t win. No one at IEM tried to take zerg to the late game even with infested terran being deleted because you can’t win it. That’s why zerg is winning all the tournaments. It has to do with balance and with the fact that zerg build orders basically don’t matter but terran and protoss build orders matter a ton and can be countered once you know them.

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Greed can’t be punished if spamming 150 mineral queens is all it takes to deflect everything.

No gas consumed, no larva used, no tech needed and on top of that they’re the macro mechanic that they were going to build to begin with.

I’m also not sure zerg even plays reactionary. Sure, they can play that way, but quite often I just see them doing whatever they want and the opponent has to deal with it.

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It’s a shame the statistics disagree. Zerg gets the majority of their wins in the early game. If his theories are this wildly detached from reality, there is no point wasting precious seconds of your life on his video.

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Would you say there’s a stage of the game where zerg feels weak?

How often does serral lose a late game compared to an early one?

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Majority of Zergs wins are in early game?

Well, duh. If everyone needs to throw themselves on Zerg like rabid dog to have any chance of winning.

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Agreed. Jump to 41:10 on the video and read the first comment. It says “all ins are cool when they are precise and calculated builds. They feel significantly less cool when they are the only option”. That post is the best explanation of what’s wrong with the game currently. Be it TVP or PVZ, many feel like they don’t have a chance to win unless they all in, and feeling like you have to absolutely have to gamble and cut corners is never fun. Thats honestly what a lot of pros are feeling right now.

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His main point is that too many playstyles were nerfed out of existence, to the point that there only 1-2 viable ways to play match-up and this is boring. Furthermore, it makes games too predictable.

His second main point is that Terran and Protoss are so disadvantaged in late game against Zerg that we don’t see pro players going into late game. They either win while on 2-3 bases or die trying. While this is balanced win rate vise, it is simply not fun to play / watch.

His third main point is suggestion how to make game more fun, is to start adding new* units and removing current ones, and doing this on regular basis, e.g. add Dragoon and Corsair, but remove Phoenix and Stalker for 6 months. Then do this with other units for other 6 months and so on.

*units from campaign, co-op and betas, because there is no chance than Blizz will make absolutely new units

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Pretty much! Zerg design is just so radically different from not just Protoss and Terran, but many other RTS races in general, to the point where they’re trying so hard to be different it’s no longer novel nor original it’s just stupid. The “spirit” behind Zerg is supposed to be a swarming onslaught - Yet ironically Blizzard have completely botched this concept and implemented a bunch of opposite and contradictory design choices;

A boring click as fast as you can creep mechanic with such a large differential in advantages to being on it vs being off it that most macro games simply come down to, “Did you fight on creep more than you didn’t? If you did you probably win.” Seriously listen to casters talk about Zerg games it’s hilarious. Their “top level” analysis is constantly stating that “Everything was going great! Then you see here they had this terrible engagement off creep. They can’t be doing that if they want to win!” Creep facilitates campy play if you want to win. You should never leave your side of the map and why would you? The enemy will simply kill themselves trying to kill you because they have to attack you before your economy gets exponentially out of control. It’s been the ZvX meta-game for all of Sc2. The audacity of Zerg players to complain about Mech is amusing on that note, considering they’ve had to play like Mech players for 10 years. It’s just different unit skins lmao.

Queens which are REQUIRED to play the race are meant to sit around all game and nurse bases. A tanky, clunky, boring, no-micro unit that is amazing defensively but you can’t use it to attack unless you go all-in with a Nydus worm, something else they’ve somehow never managed to balance properly. As they’ve added cool new toys to Terran and Protoss over each expansion they’ve just kept buffing the Queen instead of giving Zerg something to fight back with.

Larvae Mechanic is scaled so awfully that Zerg has no choice but to play for late-game. You can’t make army and drones at the same time for the first 10 minutes. Your only strategy is to be as greedy as possible and get to late-game so you have excess larvae. Any attack you do is generally bad because once again you’re fighting off creep, don’t do that…

Brood-Lords and Swarm-Hosts are sad excuses to distract people from the above abominations to make Zerg feel more “swarmy”. Endless minion spam that’s slow and boring to play against. Not only that they also ruined the viewing pleasure of the game for years at a time. Brood-Lord/Infestor 2012 era. HOTS Swarm-Host hour long games. Brood-Lord/Infestor coming back again. God it’s disgusting.

The economy changes at the start of LOTV remedied some of this for a little while but the meta-game slowly receded back to late-game rushes for Zerg. You can’t blame the players for it either, they’re just trying their best to win. There are probably more things I missed but it’s stressing me out just thinking about it.

Forget win-rates and balance for a moment. Zerg is just a fundamentally broken RTS race. There is so much potential and cool lore but they pissed it away. People get so upset and obsessive about win rates that they haven’t even noticed the game isn’t fun anymore. Sc2 was a booming game with 3 million players at the start, then people got a taste of the future with Broodlord/Infestor and left in droves for other games. It’s not like those other games we’re magically suddenly more fun. RTS was declining already but Sc2 showed everyone it was a still a fun genre for bit, then it was spoiled by awful design; ie namely Zerg.

If they make a StarCraft 3 they need to remake this race from the ground up.

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Although I understand why pros are against the 6 worker start I think it had mitigated this problem to some extent. With a 6 worker start the early game was much longer and it was a lot easier to punish greed. The harass in the early game wasn’t the nonsense we see today with 4-6 hellions suiciding into a mineral line for the Zerg to later just remake the drones no problem. There was a back and forth.

  • Zerg was never meant to take a 3rd so fast - If this was a beta for an RTS in the making everyone would immediately conclude that Zerg economy scales way too fast. But now because there are so many Zerg pros who stand to lose from this we are all blind all of a sudden.

  • Queens were never meant to be used the way they are used now - someone should make a graph of how many queens per base on average were built in a standard macro Zerg build in each year’s meta. I bet it would start from 1 and go up to almost 3.5 today.

  • Creep was never meant to be so eazy - indeed in wol/hots creep was so much more difficult to spread. Not only because queens were weaker but because by the time you have enough queens to start spreading beyond your bases T/P already have enough units to threaten you and make Creep spread your last priority. Today creep covers more than half the map before the opponent T/P can even do anything about that. This is almost by definition an imbalance.

I’m sure I’m missing some other points as well…

I’m not saying 6-worker start is nessacarily better. It’s just that it was much better in “hiding” these un-RTS like mechanics (creep spread, queens etc…) by making them a lot more difficult to use. Basically Blizzard fu**ed up with lotv. They could have nade the 12 worker start work but they didn’t identify the problem with Zerg soon enough. Hell they didn’t really identify it at all.

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I mean what beasty explained in his video would also support your claim that most zergs win in the early game. If most Toss and Terran players have to throw things at the zerg early to deny them economy in order to not reach the late game, or die trying. Then obviously they would win most of their games before the late game. That does not mean that zerg isn’t extremely favored late game. If anything it means they are favored. Unless you have a statistic that says zergs lose late game disproportionately then it would seem his video isn’t a waste of time…

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Lol he is random GM and you are probably gold league, statistics aren’t accurate…
Noob… Stupid idiot ! They doesn’t necessarily mean sh 1t about balance… Report this GUY !!!

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Outsource balancing to beastyQT or avilo and game will be balanced and fun again !!!

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I think I would rather the balance be outsourced to a bronze leaguer than see it in the hands of Avilo…

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Lol avilo is good at strategy and understands game on high level… Both beastyQT and avilo would balance game better…

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Avilo is a child and should be rewarded with nothing, and he would make the balance heavily favor his style of play over anything else as evident a few years back when he posted a list of his things he would “balance” It was very blatant what he was doing.

I’m cool with beasty taking the helm though. He is a good dude.

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Not really, he even made tournament on his balance mod and pros played it and it was fair game, looked like normal game. They is massive disinformation about avilo. I don’t agree with everything he does, but if you watched him long time enough you know he is fine. I watched a lot him back than in hots, when he was beating even koreans. People in real life even say he is nice person. He called polt hacker once, but he was on barcode and he gets sniped even 12 games in a row, or that guy jason sniped him and than one game he didn’t snipe and try to pretend avilo is making that up to leach viewers and some creepy people harass him and stalk him. And was toxic in games, but that was mainly for stream little toxicity is good, no one wants to was some goody boy, or people were snipping him 30 times in a row…

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The amount denial and projection here is astounding. Look at the WCS fall stats. Zerg gets most of their wins by allining in the early game. In the mid game terran is hugely favored. In the lategame terran and zerg are balanced. In the mid-game zerg and protoss are balanced, but in the late-game protoss is favored. Zerg is the race that is forced to allin or endure a brutal mid/late game, not terran nor protoss.

You have said being forced to allin is bad. Now that you know it is factually zerg that is forced to allin, I am sure you will cry on zerg’s behalf with as much vigor as you have for terran, right? Wrong. We both know you hate zerg and you don’t care about the facts.

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You mean the one where swarmhosts won 5% of PvZ games it was in?
Right before the blizzcon where pretty much every protoss player got wiped by swarmhosts?

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Read what you wrote carefully. Don’t see the absurd contradiction? Read it again. Still can’t see it? Ok, let me give you a clue: “wcs fall winrates are invalid because they don’t represent top level play”. Uh, sweetheart, that’s exactly why they are valid. Top level play doesn’t represent balance because there are too few games and the skill differences dwarf the effects of balance to the point of being immeasurable. You are pointing out exactly what makes the sample good and then saying it makes it bad.

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He said many things that had sense, for example, that air gameplay is one of the worst things on the game and that is the opposite of fun.